3
Thomas Mitchell and Australia Felix
Thomas Livingstone Mitchell was born on 15 June 1792 at Grangemouth in Stirlingshire, Scotland. Although he was born into a poor family Mitchell was well educated, could read in several languages, and was knowledgeable in many areas of the sciences. In 1811, he joined the armed forces and served in Portugal, where his chief occupation was to produce battlefield maps using his own topographical surveys. The Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815 and Mitchell continued as a peacetime soldier, a job that he found boring and unsatisfactory. He was relieved in 1827 when an old commander from the army offered him the position of Surveyor General of New South Wales. After arriving in Sydney in 1827 and taking the position of Surveyor General in an official capacity in 1828, Mitchell began the work of planning roads and bridges around Sydney, Parramatta and Liverpool.
Mitchell’s most important contributions were exploratory expeditions into the interior of the continent. Between 1831 and 1846, he embarked on no fewer than four journeys into New South Wales, Queensland and Port Phillip. His third expedition was perhaps the most significant. In what the Australian historian Manning Clark described as ‘one of those odd ironies of history’, it was Mitchell who would return from a journey to the south of the continent with news of a rich and fertile land awaiting European colonisation. An irony because, as Clark noted, Mitchell was a man ‘who loathed Australia, the white men, the Whig governor, the bishop, the clergy, the judges, the usurers, the Jews, the aborigines, and above all the appearance of the country’ – before this third expedition, he had only witnessed ‘vile scrub’ and raged at the ‘dry and naked wilderness’ of the Australian landscape. ‘It was his fate or his cross,’ said Clark, ‘to belong to that long list of gifted Englishmen [sic] for whom Australia was a land that was cursed and its inhabitants as barren and empty as the land that surrounded them.’ Those who knew Mitchell observed that he was ‘irascible with all men and much given to denouncing his fellow-men for their folly and their stupidity’. Towards his companions ‘he behaved with such inhumanity … that anyone who wanted a foretaste of Hell should travel with the Major over the wilds of Australia.’1 Mitchell, despite his poor temperament and often low opinion of the lands he traversed, nevertheless plays an integral role – perhaps the most important – in heralding Gariwerd’s encounter with the Europeans. Perhaps surprisingly, his journals have provided detailed, sometimes sensitive, sometimes even poetic, accounts of the Europeans’ first contact with Gariwerd.
Towards the end of 1835, the Governor of New South Wales, Richard Bourke, had instructed Mitchell to complete a survey of the Darling River on its southward journey to the Murray River ‘with the least possible delay’. By 16 March 1836, the formal expedition party had been formed: 25 men, 11 horses, 52 bullocks, 100 sheep, 22 carts, and a boat carriage and boat. Except for Granville William Chetwynd Stapylton, Mitchell’s Second in Command, all were convicts or former convicts. Some had accompanied him on his previous two expeditions; for some, their participation rested on a promise from Governor Bourke that their conditional pardons would be made absolute. When the team and its equipment had assembled at a camp near Mount Canobolas, south-west of present-day Orange, an Aboriginal man, John Piper, visited the camp and agreed to take part in the expedition. His wife, Kitty, joined at Lake Cargellio. At Booligal, two Aboriginal men whose names were recorded as Tommy Came-First and Tommy Came-Last, also joined Mitchell’s expedition, along with a woman, Turandurey, and her four-year-old daughter Ballandella.
From Canobolas, the group moved southward, down the Lachlan River to the Murrumbidgee and down the Murrumbidgee to its intersection with the Murray, where a base was established at Lake Stapylton. In late May, Mitchell took a small party down the Murray to its junction with the Darling River. It was here, along the river, that Mitchell and his party encountered and, fearing an attack on the expedition, fired on a group of about 150 Aboriginal people, killing at least seven and wounding several more.2 In his journals, Mitchell would write: ‘I gave to the little hill which witnessed this overthrow of our enemies and was to us the harbinger of peace and tranquillity the name of Mount Dispersion.’3 It is clear from his diaries, however, that he otherwise relied heavily on his Aboriginal guides to seek information and directions from Indigenous groups that the expedition met on their journey south.
After the massacre at Mount Dispersion, Mitchell abandoned the Darling and decided to explore the country around the Murray. Reaching its junction with the Loddon near the end of June, from the vantage point of Mount Hope, near present-day Kerang, Mitchell looked southward, down into the interior of what would become the colony of Victoria: ‘The country which I had seen this day beyond Mount Hope was too inviting to be left behind us unexplored; and I therefore determined to turn into it without further delay.’4 Reading a paper before the Royal Geographical Society in London one year later, he recalled: ‘After surmounting the barriers of parched deserts and hostile barbarians I had at length the satisfaction of overlooking from a pyramid of granite a much better country … It was no longer my hopeless task, as on the banks of the Darling, “to describe stagnation and delineate vacancy”.’5 The expedition continued into the interior, moving south-west towards Gariwerd in the first week of July. ‘Here, the party traversed a finely-variegated country,’ Mitchell told the audience in London. It was ‘well watered, not only by streams from the south-east, but also by others from a lofty central mass which I named the Grampians of the South.’6
On the approach to the mountains from the east, the expedition reached Duwul, or Mount William, the highest peak of the ranges, in the middle of July (Plate 3.1). ‘Being now close under the mountain, we dismounted and sent our horses back for the sake of food to the bank of the last-mentioned river,’ recorded Mitchell as his party prepared to climb the peak before them. ‘The first part of our ascent, on foot, was extremely steep and laborious, although it was along the most favourable feature I could find.’ Upon reaching the summit, he wrote in his journal
we found winter and desolation under drizzling clouds which afforded but partial and transient glimpses of the world below … All around us was hidden in mist. It was now within half an hour of sunset, but the ascent had cost so much trouble, and the country this summit commanded was so interesting to us that I was unwilling to descend without trying whether it might not be clear of clouds at sunrise.
Mitchell and five men of his expedition party spent ‘that night of misery’ atop Duwul, huddling around a small fire, ‘although, while twigs were blown into red heat at one end, icicles remained at the other, even within a few inches of the flame.’ In the morning, as the sun rose, he climbed to a promising vantage point, but found ‘all lower objects were blended in one grey shade, like the dead colouring of a picture.’ He continued to write of the landscape unfurling him before him:
The sun rose amid red and stormy clouds, and vast masses of a white vapour concealed from view both sea and land save where a few isolated hills were dimly visible. Towards the interior the horizon was clear and, during a short interval, I took what angles I could obtain. To the westward the view of the mountain ranges was truly grand. Southward or towards the sea I could at intervals perceive plains clear of timber and that the country was level.
Mitchell and his men descended, not without difficulty, from the heights of Duwul to the rolling plains below. In his published journals, he recorded the process by which he named features of the country he and his party had traversed over the course of the expedition. ‘I have always gladly adopted aboriginal names’, he ruminated, ‘and, in the absence of these, I have endeavoured to find some good reason for the application of others, considering descriptive names the best, such being in general the character of those used by the natives of this and other countries.’ But, he wrote, ‘In adding this noble range of mountains to my map I felt some difficulty in deciding on a name.’ In the end, thoughts of both the Empire and his homeland, Scotland, came to dominate:
The capes on the coast I was then approaching were chiefly distinguished with the names of naval heroes and, as such capes were but subordinate points of the primitive range, I ventured to connect this summit with the name of the sovereign in whose reign the extensive, valuable, and interesting region below was first explored; and I confess it was not without some pride as a Briton that I more majorum gave the name of the Grampians to these extreme summits of the southern hemisphere.
Thus, the icy peak of Duwul, to which the Duwul balug clan of the Djab wurrung people belonged, would eventually become Mount William in honour of the monarch who reigned over the Empire now enveloping ‘these extreme summits’. Despite appearances in the published journals, it would not, in fact, be until later that Mitchell would use ‘the Grampians’. When he first observed the range from the north-west, he and his men had simply called them the Coast Mountains. Upon his return from Mount William, Mitchell named the ranges in honour of King William IV (Gulielmi IV Regis), and dubbed them the Gulielmian Mountains. His second in command, Stapylton, also kept journals and referred to the ranges variously as Gulielmean, Gulielman, and the Blue Gulielmean Mountains. Mount William’s label was similarly fluid; Mitchell had originally named it Mount Blue, and later Mount Royal. Whatever labels they used, the mountains had a marked influence on both men. Some days after Mitchell’s Mount William ordeal, Stapylton recorded ‘a splendid view of the Gulielmean Mountains’ which were, he observed, ‘properly speaking an isolated range standing up in the midst of fertile pastoral country’. Later, on 19 July, the expedition came across ‘a vast grassy plain the most romantic veiw [sic] that can be imagined of the Guileilman mountains here opens to the beholder The grandest I have ever seen in new Holland’.7
Over the next months, Mitchell’s expedition proceeded to the southern coast where they met the Henty family, who had travelled over Bass Strait from Van Diemen’s Land some years before to establish a then largely unknown pastoral enterprise. Whalers, too, had been established on the southern coast since 1829. Stapylton’s journal records his disappointment: Mitchell ‘Found a Whaling Brig at Anchor in the Bay good Anchorage and the best description of land down to the very Beach. Obtained from Henty two bags of Flour and some Gin and Newspapers. It is annoying that were not the first discoverers.’8 On the return north, the expedition would again encounter Gariwerd, this time from the southern approach. In the middle of September, from nearby present-day Hamilton, they observed ‘the sublime peaks’ of the mountains once more. Sometime after 8 September, a decision had been made to rename the Gulielmean mountains: ‘The Grampians are close aboard and present a beautifull romantic appearance’, wrote Stapylton on 13 September.9 Travelling towards Wurgarri, the southernmost peak of Gariwerd, on 13 September, Mitchell recorded that their ‘cartwheels trundled merrily along, so that twelve miles were accomplished soon after midday, and we encamped near the extreme southern point of the Grampians, which I named Mount Sturgeon.’ The next day, Mitchell was determined to climb Mud-dadjug, the peak to the north of Mount Sturgeon, which he named Mount Abrupt:
The weather turned out better than I had expected, and from the summit of Mount Abrupt I beheld a truly sublime scene; the whole of the mountains, quite clear of clouds, the grand outline of the more distant masses blended with the sky, and forming a blue and purple background for the numerous peaks of the range on which I stood, which consisted of sharp cones and perpendicular cliffs foreshortened so as to form one grand feature only of the extensive landscape, though composing a crescent nearly 30 miles in extent: this range being but a branch from the still more lofty masses of Mount William which crowned the whole.
After returning to the plains below, and taking time to rest, Mitchell and his expedition proceeded north again, to return home. The news of what he had seen on his travels spread quickly around the colony and soon reached Britain. The Australian in Sydney reported in November 1836 on Mitchell’s ‘expedition of discovery’. The newspaper exclaimed that ‘The late journey of Major Mitchell has been replete with the most important discoveries … the principal object of the Major’s discovery has been a tract of country some 400 or 500 miles square, and replete with the finest of possible pasturage, whether for sheep or horned cattle, irrigated by innumerable streams.’ There was also great concern and wide reportage on the massacre at Mount Dispersion, but the greatest interest ultimately lay in the land, not its people. The Australian continued:
The centre of this beautiful tract of country consists of a magnificent mass of mountains; the highest of which, a peak of 7000 feet, the Major ascended. This mountain formation extends about 60 miles in length, and 30 or 40 in breadth, and forms the centre of innumerable beautiful streams, radiating in every direction from it, and watering the country … From its surpassing beauty and fertility, the Major was induced to bestow the name ‘Australia Felix’.10
Before residents in the colonial metropolises read with excitement of this promising land and drew their designs, Mitchell had looked out over Djadja wurrung country from Pyramid Hill in central Victoria, and pondered: ‘A land so inviting, and still without inhabitants! As I stood, the first European intruder on the sublime solitude of these verdant plains … I felt conscious of being the harbinger of mighty changes; and that our steps would soon be followed by the men and the animals for which it seemed to have been prepared.’11 He could not have known how prophetic these comments were when they were hastily written in his journals during that icy winter of 1836.
The pastoral invasion
The Grampian mountains encompass a significant portion of the Scottish Highlands, including its most extreme peak, as well as the site of the defeat of the indigenous Caledonians by Julius Agricola in around 83 AD. This battle was recorded by the Roman historian Tacitus as having occurred at Mons Graupius (which, translated, is Mount Graupius); this much is gathered from a medieval manuscript, Codex Aesinas, dating to the middle of the ninth century. In 1476, an edition of Tacitus’ biography of Agricola appeared in which Mons Graupius was incorrectly written as Mons Grampius. Sometime later, in 1520, the Scottish historian Hector Boece labelled the Scottish ranges the Grampians – yet another misspelling. Thus, in the nineteenth century, Gariwerd, in the south-west of the Australian continent, came to be named after the site of an ancient Roman battle on the far side of the world.
It was perhaps a highly prescient act that Mitchell should proudly name the mountain range he encountered thusly because, within a short few years, the area in and around Gariwerd would become home to a significant population of Scottish colonists. Indeed, in 1836 Lord Glenelg had claimed ‘the settlement at Port Phillip will probably be reinforced by a large number of emigrants, and a considerable introduction of capital from Scotland.’12 There is a cruel irony in this. In 1804, a book of poetry appeared in Scotland, published in Edinburgh, entitled The Grampians Desolate: A Poem. Its author, Alexander Campbell, had sought ‘to call the attention of good men, wherever dispersed throughout our island, to the manifold and great evils arising from the introduction of that system which has within these last forty years spread among the Grampians and Western Isles, and is the leading cause of a Depopulation that threatens to extirpate the ancient race of inhabitants of those districts.’ Campbell was referring to the Scottish Clearances, specifically in the Highlands, but which occurred across Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as agricultural and economic innovation displaced small-scale farmers from their properties and depopulated vast swathes of the countryside. He called upon his muse to ‘Recount, in plaintive strains, those recent ills that desolate the hoary Grampian hills; in numbers touching sweetly sad, bewail the wrongs that ruin, and disperse the Gael.’
Some decades later, a significant number of those alienated from their land and ancient livelihoods in Scotland would migrate to Australia, only to enact their own brutal clearances on Indigenous peoples. By 1848, around two-thirds of those who held squatting licences in Port Phillip were Scots – about three times their expected average – and in the Western District, two-thirds of the squatters were from Scotland.13
Among these early Scottish squatters was Donald Cameron, who took up property on the wooded plains to the south of Mount Sturgeon. So numerous were the Camerons in the Western District that in 1847 the Scottish Presbyterian agitator Reverend John Dunmore Lang wrote, after meeting a ‘Scotch Highland overseer,’ that he ‘was a Cameron – a clan which, I afterwards found, is likely to become as numerous in Phillipsland as ever it has been in the Highlands of Scotland.’14 Donald ‘Morgiana’ Cameron was born in 1815 at Inverness, and came to Australia on the S.S. Boyne, which landed at Sydney on 2 January 1839. The Boyne had left Cromarty on 1 September 1838 ‘with a band of Highlanders from Lochaber, Inverness-shire.’15 The passengers were men, women and families, most of whom were shepherds, farm servants, ploughmen, farm labourers, and house servants from the Highlands.16 Upon arrival in Australia, the Camerons sought to purchase sheep, and ‘when the flock was added to and large enough they were overlanded to Port Phillip.’17 Donald Cameron and assistant Donald McKinnon began the drive overland to Port Phillip with a flock of sheep, where he claimed the Mount Sturgeon Plains station in 1840.18
By 1849, Cameron’s Mount Sturgeon Plains pastoral property was about 11 330 ha in size and had estimated grazing capabilities for 15 000 head of sheep.19 By the 1860s, in just one subdivision of the original Mount Sturgeon property, about 30 000 sheep and 300 cattle were tended by 100–200 workers (permanent and seasonal), including various overseers, boundary riders, shepherds, bullock drivers, stockriders, hut cooks, carriers, labourers, thistle cutters and cooks, fencers, shearers, kangaroo and rabbit trappers, a stonemason, a ploughman and a saddler.20
Pastoral properties were highly significant in the economic life of colonial Victoria and the Western District, and formed the basis of European expansion into the Australian continent. The squatting invasion of the country around Gariwerd began in 1838 and was complete by 1848. Around half of the pastoral stations that would be established in this period were already claimed by 1845. By 1845, perhaps 95 per cent of Djab wurrung country had been claimed by squatters.21 They came overland from the north, from Sydney or the Monaro regions of New South Wales, or migrated directly from Britain to Geelong or Melbourne before overlanding to the district. Some journeyed over Bass Strait from Van Diemen’s Land. One overlander, Charles Wedge, who would take up Djab wurrung country to the south-west of Gariwerd, recalled that ‘Owing to the report of Sir Thomas Mitchell, some of the most enterprising of the stock-holders on the outskirts of civilization in New South Wales were induced, by the advantages of being near a shipping port, to travel their stock overland to Port Phillip … and rapidly filled up the country in the neighbourhood of the coast.’22 In 1840, a prospective settler had commenced the trip overland. He said that ‘In approaching the district of Port Phillip we understood that the line which we followed was that struck out by Major Mitchell on his return from Portland Bay.’
The ‘Major’s Line’ became an important route in the district and beyond, and provided a reference point for the pastoral expansion. Edward Bell recalled how ‘In the summer of 1842 I returned with a stockkeeper to the Devil’s River to collect the leavings of my herd. At Lake Repose, near Mount Sturgeon, I came upon Major Mitchell’s tracks, and followed the marks left by his heavy boat-carriage across the Hopkins Plains to the Fiery Creek.’23 Another squatter wrote how his ‘party was one of the numerous ones which drove sheep overland from the Sydney to the Port Phillip district in 1838’. To reach his destination he and his party followed ‘Sir Thomas Mitchell’s line of road’, and he noted that ‘At that time there were no runs taken up to the north of Mitchell’s line.’24 Another remembered that ‘In the months of July and August 1838 I saw a good deal of that part of the Western Port district lying between the Sydney road and Major Mitchell’s homeward track; the country on the Melbourne side of the track appeared to be pretty well occupied, but there was at that time only one station on the other side.’25
The journey from Sydney to Australia Felix in the early 1840s was long and arduous; it was also busy. Wedge reported ‘several other herds travelling on this road at this time. It was said that there were 20,000 cattle between Yass and Melbourne … there were so many different parties moving with stock in the same line as ourselves as made it necessary that great care should be exercised to prevent the mixing of herds, and consequent annoyance and confusion.’26 Colonists also came from over Bass Strait. Wedge remembered that:
In the year 1839 vessels began to arrive from England and Scotland, the settlement of the colony having attracted considerable notice at home. Stock-holders also began to push more into the interior, the earlier settlers having confined themselves to the coast line, and I, with my brothers, removed our stock to the country at the foot of the Grampians, now known as the Grange, on the creeks forming the river Wannon in the Australia Felix of Major Sir Thomas Mitchell … after which the country soon became fully occupied.27
The pattern of pastoral expansion into western Victoria was akin to a scramble for the best land available. Colin Campbell, who would settle at Mount Cole near Ararat, described how in 1839 after ‘surveying the then barren plains of the Loddon’, he and his brother ‘selected the country at the foot of Mount Cole, as the best unoccupied tract. At that time the country was occupied from Geelong up to the Trawalla ranges, but was quite vacant beyond these to the north and west. We tenanted a large tract of country, as it was the fashion then for squatters to occupy the best spots as stations, without much regard to their distance from each other.’28
The land in and around Gariwerd eventually became a patchwork of pastoral holdings (Fig. 3.1). Travelling from the north to the south on the eastern parts of the ranges in the 1850s, a visitor would pass through St Helena, Irrewarra and Swinton between Horsham and Glenorchy, and then through the Ledcourt & Newington property near present-day Lake Lonsdale. Towards the centre of the ranges was Wartook, which took its name from the Djab wurrung ‘werdug’. Continuing a southwards journey would take one through the large La Rose, Mokepilly and Lexington station, through Barton and Mount Burchett, and Yarram Yarram and Mount William. The Mount Sturgeon pastoral run took up land at the foot of the Serra Ranges, near present-day Dunkeld. If a traveller then turned back northwards, they might traverse Victoria Valley and Moora Moora, and further north and east the Glenisla run. Continuing towards Horsham were Brim Spring, Rosebrook and Wonwondah.
Fig. 3.1. Pastoral holdings of the Gariwerd region, 1835–1851. Source: Kenyon A S (1932) Map showing the pastoral holdings of the Port Phillip district 1835–51, now Victoria. Crown Lands Department, Melbourne.
The process by which the lands of Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali speakers were invaded was piecemeal and at times haphazard, but it was swift. Apart from Donald Cameron’s Mount Sturgeon Plains in late 1838, Thomas Chirnside – another Scot, born into a farming family just outside Edinburgh – established a station at Mount William in 1839. James Unett also took on land between the ranges at Victoria Valley in 1839. In that same year, Robert Martin, born on the island of Skye, began his overland journey and established the Mount Sturgeon run in 1840. By the end of 1840, Robert Briggs was established at Ledcourt, and Horatio Spencer Wills was grazing sheep around Mount William, where Richard Bunbury established the Barton run in April 1841. Overlander Charles Browning Hall took up Lexington, La Rose and Mokepilly in the same year, while more Camerons established themselves near Mount Sturgeon in the south. In 1842, Chirnside set up at the Mount William Plains run. From 1844, Robert Muirhead was at Yarram Yarram, north of Mount Sturgeon. Charles Hall wrote that ‘The Upper Glenelg, at its rise amongst the ranges was unoccupied, nor am I aware that any country for a considerable distance west from its source was taken up till later, and all towards Mount Arapiles and on the waters running to the Wimmera from the western side of the Grampians was yet vacant.’29 But, by early 1843, Phillip Rose was at Rosebrook on the west; in 1847, he took up the nearby Wartook run. Charles Carter and his family voyaged from Van Diemen’s Land and spent four years in Melbourne before relocating to an area near present-day Horsham. In 1845, intending to move south to the coast, they instead took up the Brim Springs run. With his sons William and John, they also claimed the Rosebrook and Wartook stations from 1858, and Glenisla from 1874. In all, the Carters probably claimed 200 000 ha of land in and around the mountains.30
The low, thinly wooded hills and gentle slopes around Gariwerd appeared to be more desirable than flatter plains further north and east from the mountains. One squatter described his reasoning and recalled how he
followed the [Wimmera] river upwards, passing the stations of Messrs. Hall and H. S. Wills, and halted under Mount William, from whence we were driven by foot-rot and the blacks. At this time a strong prejudice existed against plains as runs for sheep. It was generally supposed that the want of shelter, both from the rays of the sun in summer and the biting blasts in winter, would soon break down their constitutions, and consequently many persons had passed over this Fiery Creek District, and proceeded many miles further from their markets to occupy much worse runs, and thus, though surrounded by stations, we found it most opportunely at our disposal. We took possession of a portion of it in May 1841.31
Evidently, while pre-existing pastoral settlement accounted for some of the pattern of colonisation in the region, environmental conditions were just as important in determining where, and when, a squatter would stake their claim, depending on the body of traditional wisdom they adhered to. In the mountains themselves, forested areas were largely avoided, while clearing the heathlands that covered much of the low-lying areas and suggested poorer, less fertile land, presented an expensive, time-consuming and difficult task. Much of the heathland vegetation, well adapted to fires, would simply regenerate from underground root stocks, and even when cleared the land would require a layer of fertiliser and reliable rainfall to become economically viable.32 The surrounding plains, therefore, were a more certain proposition for colonists.
One of the earliest outlines of the pastoral invasion of Gariwerd, and the rest of Victoria, was diligently assembled by R. V. Billis and A. S. Kenyon in their 1932 book, Pastoral Pioneers of Port Phillip. From this account, the process of colonisation appears orderly, the boundaries of pastoral properties well established and maintained, even as stations changed hands over the years. In the book’s foreword, we are told that, within its pages, ‘the names of the true pioneers of Port Phillip, and the properties they held under depasturing licences, are perpetuated. With them is associated perhaps the most successful colonisation achievement the world has seen … Those colonists who explored and occupied the country laid as well the foundations of national stability. Without assistance or encouragement, often in the face of opposing sources, they subdued the wilderness. They established flocks and herds of unrivalled excellence, and from the primeval bush they fashioned some of the most noted properties of the Empire.’33
This image of the Victorian pastoral pioneers remained dominant in popular understandings of the region’s early European history. But it is a remarkable statement, because embedded within it seem to be some telling assumptions about the nature of the landscape and the process of colonisation. As those early European colonists well knew, this land was not unoccupied before their arrival, and the countryside was no primeval wilderness, free of human interference. Certainly, they had been assisted in their endeavours, and most of them knew – and frequently lamented – about the corollary of ‘successful colonisation’: the dispossession of Indigenous Australians. This was a particularly violent process in western Victoria, and Gariwerd did not escape the bloodshed: it was the site of a guerrilla war of resistance that was often suppressed violently. The abrupt disruption to land management regimes that had existed for generations heralded a series of environmental transformations that continue to have repercussions today.
Endnotes
1.Clark CMH (1973) A History of Australia, Volume III: The Beginning of an Australian Civilization 1824–1851. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, pp. 96–97.
2.‘Major Mitchell’s Expedition’, The Australian, 30 January 1837, p. 2; ‘Major Mitchell’s Expedition’, The Colonist, 2 February 1837, p. 7.
3.Mitchell T (1839) Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia. Vol. 2. T & W Boone, London, p. 104.
4.Mitchell (1839), p. 157.
5.Mitchell T (1837) Account of the recent exploring expedition to the interior of Australia. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 7, 271–285. doi:10.2307/1797528
6.Mitchell (1837), pp. 235–236.
7.Stapylton WC (1836) in Andrews AJE (Ed.) (1986) Stapylton: With Major Mitchell’s Australia Felix Expedition, 1836. Blubber Head Press, Sandy Bay, p. 141.
8.Stapylton (1836), p. 123.
9.Stapylton (1836), p. 185.
10.‘Expedition of discovery’ (1836) The Australian, 8 November, p. 2.
11.Mitchell (1839), p. 159.
12.Glenelg, Lord (1836) in Turner HG (1904) A History of the Colony of Victoria: From its Discovery to its Absorption into the Commonwealth of Australia. Longmans, Green and Company, Melbourne, p. 152.
13.Wilkie B (2017) The Scots in Australia 1788–1938. Boydell Press, Woodbridge.
14.Lang JD (1847) Phillipsland; or, the Country Hitherto Designated Port Phillip: Its Present Condition and Prospects, as a Highly Eligible Field for Emigration. Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, London, p. 175.
15.Border Watch [Mount Gambier] (1938) 25 January, p. 4.
16.Persons on government ships, August 1837–40. State Records New South Wales, NRS 5313, 4/4780.
17.Hamilton Spectator (1999) 4 March.
18.Hamilton Spectator (1870) 6 April; Hamilton Spectator (1870) 13 April; Hamilton Spectator (1887) 11 January; Spreadborough R, Anderson H (1983) Victorian Squatters. Red Rooster Press, Melbourne, p. 125.
19.Wilson E (1849) The Squatters’ directory: containing a list of all the occupants of Crown Lands, in the intermediate and unsettled districts of Port Phillip…compiled from the Government Gazette. Edward Wilson, Melbourne, p. 6.
20.Armytage station records, 1858–1948. State Library of Victoria, MS 7829.
21.Clark ID (2016) ‘We Are All of One Blood’: A History of the Djabwurrung Aboriginal People of Western Victoria, 1836–1901. Vol. 1. Createspace Publishing, Scotts Valley.
22.Wedge C (1853) in Bride TF (Ed.) (1898 [1969]) Letters from Victorian Pioneers. Heinemann, Melbourne, p. 87.
23.Bell E (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 294.
24.Hutton C (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 247.
25.Templeton J (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 251.
26.Hall CB (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), pp. 261–262.
27.Wedge C (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 87.
28.Campbell C (n.d.) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 315.
29.Hall CB (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 266.
30.Billis RV, Kenyon AS (1932) Pastoral Pioneers of Port Phillip. Macmillan, Melbourne.
31.Thomson AT (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 328.
32.Calder J (1987) The Grampians: A Noble Range. Victorian National Parks Association, Melbourne.
33.Billis and Kenyon (1932), p. ix.
Plate 1.1 The Balconies, near Mount Victory, showing distinctive backslopes of the cuesta landform along the Serra Range in the background. Photo: Alistair Paton, 2013.
Plate 1.2 Grass trees (Xanthorrhoea australis) in flower in the Gariwerd mountains. Photo: John Manger.
Plate 1.3 A variety of fringe lilies (Thysanotus juncifolius, T. patersonii, and T. tuberosus) can be found in deeper soils, well-drained heathlands and open forests. Photo: Alistair Paton, 2013.
Plate 2.1 Detail of motifs in Billimina shelter, Victoria Range. Photo: Benjamin Wilkie, 2016.
Plate 2.2 Bunjil’s Shelter in the Black Range. Photo: Alistair Paton, 2013.
Plate 3.1 Sunrise at Duwul (Mount William). Photo: Alistair Paton, 2013.
Plate 4.1 Mount Sturgeon viewed from the plains below near Dunkeld. Photo: Douglas Wilkie, 2006.
Plate 5.1 Sunrise in the Mount Difficult ranges. Photo: Alistair Paton, 2013.
Plate 7.1 Protective fencing at Manja prevents vandalism and damage to the rock art and shelter. Photo: Benjamin Wilkie, 2016.